Carsyn Patton

The UNC Nutrition Research Institute (NRI) is leading the development of individualized nutrition. Part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the NRI is located in Kannapolis, NC. Scientists at the NRI seek to discover why people differ in their metabolism and nutritional requirements and to use this understanding to ensure optimal health through individualized nutrition (precision nutrition). Just as precision medicine is the next frontier in medical treatment, precision nutrition holds great potential to enhance our ability to prevent, delay the onset, or mitigate the progression of disease and to improve health outcomes. We aim to enhance understanding of health and human development through greater knowledge of how genetic, epigenetic, microbiome and metabolic mechanisms affect a person’s requirements for and responses to nutrition. Our guiding scientific premise is that each of us is metabolically unique. The NRI is dedicated to answering the question of how these differences affect an individual’s health, and, in so doing, update the current, but outdated, paradigm of a singular dietary guideline with specific nutritional recommendations and actions by which an individual can improve his or her health and quality of life. The NRI seeks to become a global leader in precision nutrition through the following goals: (1) to advance the science of individualized nutrition by performing cutting-edge research, (2) to educate and train future generations of nutrition researchers, (3) to translate nutrition research findings for the general public and (4) to support regional economic redevelopment.